Responding to a blog piece on Article 13 by YouTube’s Lyor Cohen, Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive BPI, said:
"We are pleased that YouTube now claims to support the premise of Article 13 – namely that artists and labels should be paid fairly. However, this is difficult to square with its ongoing carpet-bombing propaganda against that provision, which feels like a challenge to the legitimacy of the democratic process. Article 13 has been carefully scrutinised over four years by the European Commission, Council and Parliament. These three institutions have rightly concluded that the Value Gap is real and that YouTube ought to take some responsibility for the content it publishes, just like other publishers. YouTube now seems to be trying to scaremonger the EU into reversing decisions taken after a full debate, because it doesn’t like the outcome.
Lyor Cohen argues that ad-supported revenues are helping to fuel music industry growth. That's far from our experience. Despite many billions of views, ad-supported video now generates less than half the revenue labels make from vinyl, and only one-sixteenth of the revenue from premium subscriptions. This problem needs to be fixed.
It’s time for YouTube to respect the EU legislative process and focus its energy on working with labels to grow the value generated by recorded music, for example through its excellent new YouTube Music subscription service, rather than trying to protect an outdated safe harbour that has given it an unfair advantage over both competing services and individual musicians and creators.
The money YouTube is spending to preserve special protections for its business would be much better spent rewarding the great music that drives users to its platform."
